Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/66980/single-point-perspective-the-future-of-henri-matisse/
Thomas Micchelli blogs about Matisse's 1948 painting Interior with Egyptian Curtain (Phillips Collection) currently on view in the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Matisse has painted not one picture but three abutted together: the window, the curtain and the still life. While each competes for your attention in its own dazzling way — the window in an explosion of short strokes, the curtain with an interlocking pattern of abstracted shapes, and the still life with a simple but blazing interaction of yellow, pink, black and white — to the postmodern eye the combination of components seem to betray a loss of faith in the ability of a single image to express the fullness of an artist’s vision." Micchelli continues, noting that "the jangling, jazzy profusion of images deny the painting a conventional center of interest. The images, however, do not direct the eye to all four quadrants of the canvas, as Matisse does in his other interiors; instead they compact a heightened level of interest in three discreet sections. To again take the work from a postmodern perspective, Matisse’s “Interior with an Egyptian Curtain” can be viewed as more overt in its deconstruction of pictorial integrity than something like Willem de Kooning’s black-and-white 'Painting,' which was done the same year."
Link to Post:
http://henrimag.com/blog1/?p=6342
Mark Stone reflects on the ever-present possibility to see and form anew through the act of painting.
Stone points to the self contained worlds in a late work by Picasso and a pastel by Degas. In the Degas, he writes, "everything feels close, contained. The surfaces are filled with crosshatches and heavy pastels. The beautiful bathers emerge through the lens and then find a thicker reality in Degas’ line, the flesh formed with each stroke of color, the line tracing the reality in front of us. These visions are not mine, and I’m not supposed to fill in the blanks, there are none to choose. I am supposed to look, to see something that’s not me. I am there with Degas, experiencing an entropic moment, understanding that this drawing is both image and being at once, a hybrid of visual existence."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/01/inventing-abstraction-absences-matisse/
Tyler Green laments the abscence of paintings by Henri Matisse in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view from December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
Green writes: "Much in the coming abstraction — in particular its bright, shining hues — is descended from Matisse... Leaving the tricky question of foundation for another time, it could be argued that Matisse pushed harder toward abstraction than Picasso did." Green convincingly cites Matisse's paintings Palm Leaf, Tangier (1912), French Window at Collioure (1914), Composition, Issy-les-Moulineaux (1915) and Shaft of Sunlight, the Woods of Trivaux (1917) as proof.
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2013/01/the-modern-art-notes-podcast-henri-matisse/
Tyler Green talks to Rebecca Rabinow about Henri Matisse and his process of investigating a visual ideas on multiple canvases. Rabinow is one of the three curators of the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
In the web introduction for the show Rabinow writes that Matisse "used his completed canvases as tools, repeating compositions in order to compare effects, gauge his progress, and, as he put it, 'push further and deeper into true painting.' While this manner of working with pairs, trios, and series is certainly not unique to Matisse, his need to progress methodically from one painting to the next is striking... For Matisse, the process of creation was not simply a means to an end but a dimension of his art that was as important as the finished canvas."
Link to Post:
http://cityarts.info/2012/12/26/luminous-gravity/
John Goodrich reviews the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through March 17, 2013.
Goodrich writes: "As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, [Matisse] possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting... In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents."
Link to Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/arts/design/matisse-exhibition-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html
Roberta Smith previews the exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view from December 4, 2012 - March 17, 2013.
Smith writes that Matisse "communed with artists of the distant or not-so-distant past, from Giotto to Cézanne, and periodically brushed shoulders with Cubism and the work of his chief rival, Picasso. But his main desire was, as he put it, to 'push further and deeper into true painting.' This project was in every sense an excavation, and he achieved it partly by digging into his own work, revisiting certain scenes and subjects again and again and at times also making superficially similar if drastically divergent copies of his paintings. His rigorous yet unfettered evolution is the subject of [the exhibition], one of the most thrillingly instructive exhibitions about this painter, or painting in general, that you may ever see."
Link to Post:
http://www.artblog.net/post/2012/08/matisse/
On the occasion of the exhibition Matisse: Doubles and Variations on view at the National Gallery of Denmark, Cohenphagen (through October 28 - opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York on December 3), Franklin Einspruch makes an observation about Matisse's technique: "underpainting. Specifically, grays. The colorist of the century worked his magic on a template of grays."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/2012/07/the-snail-late-matisse-in-context/
Robin Greenwood considers "an important and relevant question to ask (time and again) about abstract art: what does distinguish it from design?" He continues: "Matisse's late work does contribute quite prominently, if not iconically, to a certain strand in the conjunction of modernism and abstraction which blurs the distinction between art and design, and more specifically between abstract painting and the decorative and applied arts... I’ve always considered Matisse’s greatest contribution to art not his colour, which is undoubtedly exceptional, but his inventive painterly architectures reasserting what [painting] does (what, in a way, it has always done), what it delivers, by the act of continual reinvention; finding yet more new ways to keep it alive – and of course, keep it keenly separate from design and the applied arts even when in the act of using elements of those very disciplines to elaborate and enrich the spatial structures of his painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.theartblog.org/2012/07/gauguin-cezanne-matisse-visions-of-arcadia-at-the-philadelphia-museum-of-art/
Andrea Kirsh reviews the exhibition Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view through September 3, 2012.
Kirsh writes: "In terms of the exhibition's theme one has to ask, why this subject then? And why such monumental paintings? The previous avante-garde had pointedly rejected the hierarchies of the Academy, which considered still lives and portraits beneath consideration, landscapes a lesser genre, and valued only history painting: paintings of figures depicting scenes from Biblical or Classical stories or actual events, such as Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. These have been called the grand machines of the French tradition, and only Manet attempted the genre (traditionally with the Execution of Maximilian, and in abased form with his Dejuner Sur l’Herbe and Olympia). This return to majestic history painting certainly raises the question of what turn-of-the-20th century painting should be and do, and where it fits within the history of art. The paintings by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse stand out in scale and ambition, exceptions within their oeuvres.
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/barnes-foundations-new-facility.html
Charles Kessler visits and reviews the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Kessler writes: "There are many good reasons why breaking the Barnes trust was a bad idea... And while a case can be made that this type of installation is a cultural artifact worth preserving, there are other ways, short of wholesale preservation, to document it. The bottom line is I LOVED the new Barnes... all of [the] criticisms come to nothing when confronted with the art - it will make you weep with joy! They have 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris... And they have Matisse's Joy of Life which, along with Picasso's Demoiselles D’Avignon, is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century art. And now Joy of Life is in its own alcove instead of hanging in a stairway as in the old Barnes... And it absolutely glows. "
